random vignettes (between here and bracey dr.)

it's nights like these, restless nights with moans and sobs bottled in my chest that I want to swallow smoke, take up fire eating as a profession, swallow censers and censers and censers of catholic smell-goods and witches won't stop riding me even though i'm not sleep yet...

butterflies. a wasp sits on my hand. i concentrate on nothing, think of the fragility of its potential malice, i'm personifying and we are at an impasse; my hand as big as a mountain, it leisurely pacing my greenish veins as if it is for a stroll at some tourist destination

last night you were in my dreams.poet.wunderkid.  you were pressing my palm or i was pressing yours. i sang like mahalia/motherless child/i never
felt this close to you in real life
you were so high 


i spoke in tongues just to say 
hello


there is a turtle in my belly, drinking my tears, sour in my stomach. somewhere this turtle holds up a world where the tears would mean something. but not in me. my grandmother was from mississippi or alabama
black as black as black as black as black
my grandfather a polack
my last name is suzensky
all my teachers wondered how a bad ass black bitch from the projects
got a sweet little european name/like the sound of cowbells and girls with flowing hair
only one had the balls to ask me
Only Ezilie Danto might understand
bad ass holy black bitch from poland and ayiti
heaven help me
only in pittsburgh

you tasted like tears to me. I wasn't afraid of you, scared of myself;


 I wasn't seven again, somewhere dying on a dirty blanket between 
me and the ceiling
and I'm looking down on
me like I put my own eyes in my mouth
and swallowed them


but the scrolls are sweet to the lips and sour to the stomach;
death lives in the beginning;
forgive me, my mother gave me a morbid mind-
her name was babylon


i was seven.


I was seven.

i could never remember the 
faces, names either
people walk up to me
remember me from some dream a long time ago
ask me how im doing, 
my mom
my brother
call me that other name
and i smile
and nod
they don't know it was all just
figment anyway
they want me to remember
too